The South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA) is the regional film archive for the South West of England. Established in 1993, SWFTA's core collection comprises of the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and TSW (Television South West). The archive also cares for a significant number of donated film collections, both amateur and professional, dating back to the early 1900s.
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Portrait of an Artist
Lenkiewicz and a relationship study on self portraiture.
From the collection of:
Overview
Robert Lenkiewicz explores the thoughts of a painter and the motivation behind self-portraiture as he indulges in a long sitting with his muse Mary. He ironically discusses high-art suppositions and commercial illusions which, in his opinion, serve to shroud the portrait painter in romantic myths .Mary was his Project which studied the development of an obsessional relationship, an experiment of which she was unaware.
He kept diaries with innumerable sketches of Mary as he became more and more obsessed both by her and the process of self-examination of one man’s physiology ‘in a state of crisis’. Lenkiewicz was born the son of German Polish refugees in London in 1941 and they ran a Jewish guesthouse called Hotel Shem-tov. Lenkiewicz was brought up in London and attended the Saint Martin’s School of Art before moving to Plymouth in 1965. Lenkiewicz died in 2002 leaving enormous debts because he never dealt with money directly; he preferred to barter.
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